The catharsis of fireworks springs us forward into the new year as if under a common obligation to forget what we know of all previous new years and their outcome. The Sabayans and I reminisce for days, recalling mental pictures taken by the light of fires and the muzzle-flashes of kanyon while avoiding all mention of the mortal passion which had gripped us. The recognition of an unspoken, unspeakable desolation pouring down from the stars and welling up from the ocean is, I think, the basis of our affection for each other, as why might it not be for anybody anywhere.

Going back to spear fishing after a lapse I find my neck muscles aching. It is like ‘weaver ’s neck’ from which Second World War fighter pilots suffered in their constant searching for enemy aircraft. In their case it resulted in chafing (it was to prevent this, rather than out of gratuitous dandyism, they wore silk scarves) but muscular cramps afflicted them as well. My own neck muscles bunch and knot as I go hunting fish through alien skies. The combat is unequal, my victories comparatively few, besides which there is the arduousness of working always against the inner oxygen clock. This can produce beautiful effects of heightened detail, of the special kind of noticing one associates with limited time. Whether scared or simply fighting the body’s craving to be spared this discomfort I carry back up with me vivid details which have about them the aura of being acquired against the odds, of having been wrested from somewhere obscure. Fright, which occurs quite often, is especially good for freezing indelible images: the grey shark hanging there ten feet away and watching, the moray one did not notice, the banded sea-snake investigating a pair of legs rendered motionless by an act of sheer will.

Much later and many thousands of miles away I will come upon Oliver Lyttelton’s From Peace to War which has this paragraph about his experiences in the trenches in the First World War:

Turning to Paul Fussell’s book again I will find not only this very paragraph quoted but nearby a sentence from Max Plowman’s A Subaltern on the Somme: ‘What a strange emotion all objects stir when we look upon them wondering whether we do so for the last time in this life.’ At first sight it might seem merely pretentious to draw a parallel between being caught up in a famous holocaust and doing a bit of fishing, but the mind cares nothing for such scruples when it makes its associations. Fear for one’s life echoes straight down a dank well into the soul. The circumstances do not much matter, it is enough to know one may very shortly be dead and that the translation will be violent and painful. Besides, the exactness of Lyttelton’s image is too great to be ignored. I have carried with me out of the sea a nearly eidetic memory of a hundred different expeditions, of my comrades and of our victims and of our wounds. I can remember things such as I never can on dry land. Yet while the details can be recalled with clarity the gaze has often passed through them. Undersea terrains are not to be mapped by their details: the land they compose is viewed under strain and at once becomes somewhere else. I scan it with an accurate haste beside which my view on land has a leisurely vagueness.

For the chronological as well as the oxygen clock ticks on. One day infirmity or age will keep me from the sea for ever and it is not fanciful on any sortie to wonder whether I have shared an element with a cuttlefish or squid for the last time. This is Max Plowman’s ‘strange emotion’ which in large part consists of tenderness. I devour the sight of these creatures with a kind of gentle greed, marvelling once again at the language of their skin, at the ‘passing cloud’ effect as their chromatophores blink and meld to send colours chasing over their bodies, at the violet lightnings of their skirts. I can hardly believe there will come a day when I shall no longer be able to watch them.

My beating heart drives me downwards. Wordsworth showed how hardly possible it is for us to disentangle our landscapes from our childhoods but I wish I knew for certain where it came from, this extravagant desire of mine for something so distant from all the landscapes of my youth and which now makes my middle age look foolish. The feud with my father may well have closed off certain possibilities, but I would like to know why it should be in this subaqueous world – of all the marches of earth – that I should have looked for and found a magnificent and lonely poetry.

When I first returned to Tiwarik (it now feels almost a lifetime since I clapped eyes on it amid careering wave-casts) I remember thinking it could not assume a proper identity until it had acquired a position in the mind. But already I must have been imagining living there because when for lack of a better site my hut was built a little above the strand it caused me to feel disorientated for some time. Instead of its facing Sabay across the strait I must always have imagined it on top of the island somewhere and facing out the other way across the expressive blank ocean. Consequently I experienced a strange twisting sensation as if the island were being rotated against its will from right to left – that is, anticlockwise as seen from above. This persisted for some weeks and was mildly bothersome because it hinted at strain in a pattern I was trying to impose on the island (or it on me).

Less mildly, this phenomenon involved me in a good deal of unnecessary swimming since at night I often lost my way. If one is spear fishing on a moonless night with only a torch, and especially if one is too far away from shore to hear its breakers above the wash of surrounding waters, it is easy to become lost. Then, buoyed up on a swell I would glimpse the yellow lights of Sabay, faint oil lamps nearly drowned, and think I was on the wrong side of Tiwarik because for me my house was really perched above an imaginary beach on the seaward side. Half exhausted by three hours’ hunting and towing a catch-line with several kilos of fish, I once arrived beneath the sheer igneous headland standing deep in lurching tons of surf. I was expecting to step out and stroll up a coral beach to my hut where I could smother my catch beneath a layer of salt and sleep until dawn. Instead of which I found I still faced a long swim against a strengthening current.

I am intrigued by this whole process of orientation and Tiwarik is the perfect place for throwing it all into doubt. One day I spend a lazy morning after a night’s fishing, marinading and then laying out the catch on the drier. Something far away in my mind is nagging, meanwhile. It is that even to this remotest of remote places I have brought a chore with me for which there is a deadline. It is a literary chore, itself bizarre in the circumstances: to re-read a children’s novel I wrote long ago as a preliminary to writing an outline treatment of it for a film script. I have frequently come across this book over the months, down at the bottom of my bag jumbled up with spare torch batteries, lengths of elastic, a copy of James’s Princess Casamassima (why?) and a treasured cake of Roger & Gallet’s ‘Vétiver’ soap. Now I go and dig it out reluctantly climb up to the edge of The Field of Guavas and sit in the shade of an antipolo tree.

On reading it again I remember little of the story yet at the same time it remains utterly familiar. Suddenly I come upon the sentence: ‘To his left he could just make out the huge bulk of the Seneschal’s House …’ and am brought up short. Not by the redundancy of the adjective but by that left. Surely I meant right? The sea is on the right together with the house being pounded to pieces by the waves. It must mean that sixteen years ago I had ‘approached’ the fictitious town of Carisburgh by the wrong direction.

This is very odd. The one consistent thing about one’s own writing is the position of the eye. I do not know what governs the way in which one always sees an imagined view – a house, a road, a room – from a particular angle. Maybe there was a time in childhood when the bearings of such things became fixed so that after a holiday, for example, certain kinds of imagined coastline are for ever approached from the same direction, thus, the sea always on the right. There is a plausibility about this. It took me a long time to perceive how my fantasies and day-dreams set indoors (‘set’, of course, being the word in this theatre of audience participation) took place in rooms which, no matter how disguised initially, tended to slide back into archetypes of rooms in the first two houses I can remember and usually into my own bedroom. Not in terms of colour or upholstery but of disposition: the window here in relation to the bed; the bed lengthways against the wall rather than with the head against it; the door (representing threat of intrusion) in that corner and opening in this direction. And thus the writer as the dreamer of narratives calls instinctively upon the same internal compass to orientate imaginary acts.

How then could I have written ‘left’ when I had to have meant ‘right’? The book slips off my lap and I discover I have been gazing out to sea for an unguessable time without registering either it or the distant boat crawling across it. (How swamping the inward view which rises up and drowns the visible world!) I drag myself back to the text and forcing myself to read with more attention now discover what I had missed. The character Martin – and hence the narrating eye – is approaching the house from a different and not wrong direction. It was deliberate. I am relieved, having for a moment been disorientated by not being able to visualise my own story and feeling that peculiar twisting sensation as if something were trying to turn itself round the right way. In the human brain there is no magnetic north and yet all imaginary actions, all dialogues, all ideas feel as though they take up an inner physical direction peculiar to them alone and assigned them as they form. It is the route they take to reach the mind’s eye; each route is unique and imparts its own flavour. Later it is easier to recall the flavour of ideas and memories than the originals themselves. I can often not remember an argument but usually the scent left by its trail in my mind, the olfactory echoes lasting vividly long after the words in which the thought was expressed have vanished without trace.

Again the book has slipped off my lap and again I find I am staring at the ocean which now contains no boat at all, not even a faint wake across its directionless expanse. Inner twistings and flavours: maybe this is how it feels to migratory birds and animals, one of whose forbears once went on a summer holiday or winter journey thereby orientating itself so thoroughly that it passed on a new set of directions for ever. Modern science glosses this inaccurately by referring to gravitational fields, stellar patterns, magnetic poles, the position of the sun and so forth, but that is only because modern science as yet knows no way of quantifying the influence of summer holidays on impressionable organisms.

Meanwhile I remember Marisil, Sising and Bini’s eldest daughter who once went to stay with relatives on the other side of a town not much more than nine miles from Kansulay. She was unbearably homesick and returned three days later even though she was supposed to have gone to be formally employed as a maid. I asked her how it had struck her, being away from home for the first time in her fifteen years.

‘I was always so sad,’ she said. ‘It’s not like here in Kansulay, they haven’t got any hills there.’ She spoke as if she had been to a foreign country. ‘And the sun was in the wrong place.’

What did this mean? I found out her relatives’ house was differently aligned. When she sat outside the front and expected the sun to rise as it did at home over the coconuts on the left and set behind the bamboos up on the hill near the place they called Babag it did no such thing. Instead it slouched across the sky in an unexpected direction. In addition to feeling immeasurably touched because she looks so like her mother I felt complete sympathy with her, knowing of the inner wrenching, the sense of bending which she could only describe as homesickness and which really told of an offence against the map in her mind. I imagine I am now at ease with the map of Tiwarik I carry in my own mind. This, however, turns out to be self-delusion, at least when it comes to my own orientation.

My disabuse begins one evening when they come for me as the light is beginning to go: Arman, Intoy and Danding in one boat, Silo, Jhoby and Bokbok in the other. They sit around drinking small nips of anisado to warm them for the long night ahead while I change into night-fishing gear: black cotton jogging suit with long sleeves and a pair of dark nylon socks. This is partly a protection against stinging plants and sea-urchins but it also lessens the attraction of my pale flesh to passing sharks. I strap a knife on the outside of my right leg. Ever since a near-disaster some months ago I seldom hunt at night without one. Arman, who played a heroic rôle in that particular drama, also wears a knife, as does Jhoby. Once none of us would have dreamed of taking knives but now we are well past feeling self-conscious and making jokes about looking like Lito Lapid, a Filipino film star of immense popularity whose endless hand-to-hand combat parts have made him a sort of ageing Bruce Lee.

By the hurricane lamp’s benign glow we check our equipment: spear guns, elastic bindings, plywood flippers, masks and goggles, torches. At the last moment Arman decides to change the batteries in his torch which takes a minute or two because of the home-made waterproofing. We are all using the same design, ordinary three-battery Chinese flashlights encased in motorcycle inner tube warty with patched repairs. The tyre is cut off with about six inches to spare, doubled back and rolled up on itself like the end of a toothpaste tube before being bound around with elastic. The result is a fat rubber torch, bulbous with air and waterproof to a great depth. A disadvantage is that it takes time to change the batteries and even longer to replace a bulb. Another minor disadvantage I have discovered occurs only at depth. Beyond a hundred and thirty feet or so the water pressure squeezes the rubber flat over the switch making it impossible to turn the torch off. This makes one-handed signalling very difficult. Tonight we will be at such depths, using both the boats’ compressors.

I am slightly tense with excitement as I run a file over the tip of my spear. I like fishing before moonrise, which effectively puts an end to it. Tonight the moon is very late and will come up at about 2.30 a.m. When the cycle changes and the moon rises almost at sunset, going down at midnight, it is a different experience. Then one drags oneself from sleep and lowers oneself over the side of a boat into black sea beneath black sky. It is too uncertain whether a dream is ending or has just begun. But now day has conveniently elided with moonless night. I have slept this afternoon, I am rested and alert. At the last moment I bring with me a spare spear and catch-line. Leaving the oil lamp burning low in the hut’s doorway I follow the others down to the shingle.

For me this anticipatory moment before a dive is almost the best part. I am fully aware of what may be waiting for us out there in the deeps but on dry land, suited up in black cotton, knife on calf and spear gun in hand, I feel competent. Food will be won from an alien element. Tonight the breeze is onshore, carrying over from the mainland a smell of incense which I recognise as sahing, the soft aromatic mess of gums used as a firelighter in charcoal stoves. It intensifies the sense of ritual, of being prepared for a mixture of ordeal and awe. For all that they are born to it I really think my companions are themselves not unaffected. Their movements as we pile equipment into the boats and push off with a hollow grating sigh of keels are practised but not casual. It is – why pretend? – a dangerous business to be conducted far below the upper air with its summer lightnings. Apart from natural hazards there is always the possibility of equipment failure. If the frayed old fan-belt driving the compressor snaps or if the engine breaks down there is a rusty standby tank which will supply two divers with about forty seconds’ worth of air. This is not enough to get them up from forty-five metres if they have been there an hour. (Indeed they ought not to have spent more than five minutes at that depth without decompressing later.) At the end of that gasping ascent will be minor haemorrhaging if they are lucky, the bends and aneurisms if not.

But we none of us dwell on such specific disasters. They simply blend into a general latency of threat enough to keep us silent as the boats head out across the sea to the far side of the island, outriggers snubbing the occasional wavelet so that it bursts into grains of phosphorescence and sows our wake with bright pollen. Except when lightning defines the horizon for an instant it is impossible to tell where water and air meet. We forge ahead into the blackness aware of Tiwarik’s proximity only because the racket of our engines comes back to us as a hollowness on the right side. The breeze is cool on our faces. We stare out with our private lack of thoughts letting the black air flow through our minds.

Danding and Bokbok cut the engines and in silence we abruptly lose way. We have arrived at the place where the seabed is strewn with huge boulders which over the millennia have been shed from the invisible cliff above. It is a good place to start for the boulders are usually a dormitory for lapu-lapu. Then the current can carry us back towards the strait over some of the richer corals. If we are still in the water when it changes we can even work our way partially across the strait to the deepest point of the channel. In this manner we will not have to waste energy swimming against the current, for although it is not as strong far underwater as it is at the surface it still counts, particularly when towing a full catch-line.

The polythene hoses are checked by torchlight and roughly straightened into two coils fore and aft. I will take one and Arman the other. On the other boat Silo and Jhoby are also preparing to dive. A boy in each boat will follow his swimmers by paddling while Bokbok and Danding do their best to keep the engines running and the compressors working. It will be a long cold night for them especially if it rains from the overcast which fits above our heads like a manhole cover. Not a star can be seen, only pinkish-mauve discharges of electricity as from faulty circuitry in the planet’s wiring. Now Bokbok has his engine running and Silo and Jhoby are in the water. I watch their torchlights turn from bright white to small green clouds as they head downwards. The torchlights of companions as they dwindle beneath the surface look most like lightning reflected on the top layer of clouds seen from a high-flying aircraft in the clear stratosphere above them: a limitless floor of greyish ground glass on whose underside appear momentary puddles of green light to tell of lone activities below. I yearn to join them.

Now Danding has our own compressor going and Arman and I gird ourselves with the narrow plastic hose: two turns around the waist and a loose hitch allowing enough free tubing for us to take the end in our mouths and leave movement unhindered. The coldly gushing air stinks of oil and the dank yeasts which have taken up residence in the walls of the tube. I bite the end to close off the supply to a mere trickle. Long before the end of the dive our jaws will ache intolerably and we will have to take a bight of the tube between our fingers and pinch it shut. Such are the lowtech recourses for those who make do without refinements like airflow regulators. Bahala na … Intoy gives me a grave salute with the paddle and a broad grin. He is huddled in the Jhon-Jhon’s stern in a plastic raincoat several sizes too big. I wave to him, adjust my mask, signal to Arman and slip over the side. Together we angle downwards towards the boulders and begin our night’s work.

Without the constraint of having to keep coming up for air one’s search is more thorough, the experience altogether less impressionistic. The submarine landscape settles down into one continuous entity instead of being broken up into small disconnected patches. In just such a way the dispersed streets of an unfamiliar capital combine to form a city. With air-supply I also miss fewer fish. Working without the compressor there is always that moment when, right on the point of surfacing for air, one spots a mullet sheltering beneath a rock and has to decide whether to take a quick shot and maybe miss, maybe get entangled in the corals and have to leave the spear and claw upwards for air; or whether to mark the place mentally, go up and breathe and go back down in the hopes of finding it again. If there is a current the chances of retrieving either mullet or spear are practically nil, as they are if the sea is at all cloudy. Merely turning around on the surface is enough to disorientate me. I find it quite possible to return to the same rock with a fresh lungful but from a different angle and not recognise it. The mullet is lost. But with the compressor inflating my lungs with the reek of oil and mildew I can take my time.

The boulders are truly immense. They lie against one another on a stony, weedless bed. There are no corals here and few plants. Not many fish are to be found here during the day except in the sparkling upper waters. But at night the caves between adjacent boulders provide shelter for quite large fish where they can hang motionlessly in the dark for nine or ten hours. With a plastic air-hose between my teeth I can go into these cave systems, into narrow tunnels whose roofs curve and hang like the skin of a tent, needlessly anxious lest a thousand-ton rock might choose that moment to settle a little more firmly in its sleep, more sensibly wary of a savage stubby eel which might be waiting in a cross-passage. Tonight I find a reasonable haul of surgeon-fish, dark brown and flattish, each weighing a good half-pound. I also find a couple of samaral, speckled and rather rectangular fish whose flavour I prize above that of nearly all others in these waters. They are adept at flattening themselves against walls and even roofs to avoid torchlight, whereas if they are surprised on an open seabed they will do the opposite, adroitly angling themselves so as to present only their narrow backs to the beam of light. (The practised spear fisherman holds his torch sideways at arm’s length and brings his spear tip to within six inches of the fish from the opposite direction.) Fish like these samaral which flatten themselves against rock walls are easy to spear but just as easy to lose unless they are thick enough in the body to engage the barb. Otherwise the spear tip alone goes through them, striking the rock on the far side and allowing the fish to wriggle free before it can be grasped. Grasping a samaral is like holding a snake: it must be done with address and decisiveness because its dorsal and ventral spines are agonisingly poisoned. I grip the heads of these ones and pass them back to join the surgeon-fish, hoping they will not drift into the path of one of my kicking feet. (I once shot a bantol dead through the top of its head and was proud of getting it safely onto the catch-line since it is a member of the family which includes stonefish and lionfish and is similarly armed with poisoned barbs around its head and back. Half an hour later the current brought the catch-line tangling into my legs. Forgetting the bantol I kicked out. The pain was so awful I had to go ashore: it monopolised attention even to the extent that it became possible to forget not to breathe water.)

Now from between some boulders I catch a glimpse of Arman’s far-off light and change direction slightly to bring us closer. We have traversed the field of boulders and are at the extreme range of their tumbled trajectories. The seabed is changing as the water deepens. So far we have not been much below thirty feet but now there is a perceptible slope dotted with coral outcrops. This, I know, will remain fairly uniform since we are working our way along its face as we round the island. To our left the boulders, to our right the black gulfs. The slanting horizon ahead raises its metropolitan skyline of turrets and spires, avenues and arcades. At least, it does so in daylight. Now my torch reveals not cathedrals and office-blocks but anatomical details attached to amorphous bulks: tripes, spines and brains; antlers and tusks; wens, polyps, lipomas and sea-cancers. The rocks are encrusted with living corals of all kinds, most of the rocks themselves being dead growths. Plants incline gently to the current. The delicate silver-beige fans of hydroids wave their plumes. They sting worse than nettles and can leave a brown stain on the skin like the aftertrace of a burn. This vegetable mass conceals all sorts of nooks and caverns, fissures and pits which are home or shelter to a vast variety of living creatures only a tiny percentage of which are my own potential prey.

Arman appears from behind an outcrop. His torch-beam catches the brilliant craters of air spilling from his mouth and wobbling upwards. Briefly we light up each other’s catch-lines to make sure that tonight’s luck is evenly distributed. I used to be quite competitive until it became obvious there was no way I could compete with him over an extended period. Luck might win me a bigger catch than his even on two consecutive nights, but finally he was far the better fisherman and could go out on nights when I hardly found a fish and bag enough to keep his family in food for a couple of days. At this moment, however, we have roughly the same amount. Arman stays where he is while I head off to the right towards deeper water, my own preference, and work parallel with him roughly thirty metres away.

I am examining a coral as tall as I am and shaped like a series of crinkly interleaved ice-cream wafers. The technique with these is to swim above them and shine the torch directly down into the deep fissures; several species like to rest in the crisp folds but tonight there is nothing worth bagging. As I move off my line snags something behind me, tugging the tip of my spear momentarily downwards. Simultaneously, in the water beside the coral and then directly through my legs a torpedo slides. It stops and turns and hangs there not two metres away, sideways on, a five-foot shark. Its mouth is not fully closed and from it trail white strands.

A five-foot shark is no threat to me so although my first reaction is the usual one of freezing shock this passes at once. I have met sharks before during day and night, ones twice the size and on one startling occasion a fifteen-footer. But anything seen underwater appears larger than it is and viewed as a fish this small shark is extremely big. I do not wish to take my torch-beam off him to examine my catch-line but assume that, attracted by the blood of my catch, he has just helped himself to the lot. As I watch, his mouth cranks open another inch. There is the whiteness of many teeth but no green nylon. Tentatively I bring my spear-tip round as if to perform a wholly imaginary act and in that instant the shark is gone. I do not even see his tail flick. My light stares through an empty chamber of water where not even a few threads of meat hang to betray his recent occupancy. Half expecting him to be circling nearby, or maybe a larger relative, I nervously shine my beam around before inspecting the catch-line. It appears intact but then I find the first three fish I shot are only half-fish. All of them have been snipped neatly away leaving three heads strung on the end of the line. From one of these hangs a white worm of gut.

Disgruntled at having three decent fish ruined I return to the hunt with the feeling of going back to the beginning again, like on that night long ago when I was a neophyte but shooting quite well, passing a series of fish back down my catch-line and finding things surprisingly easy only to discover that the stop-knot on the end had come unravelled and I was towing an empty line. Now I re-orientate myself with respect to the slope and see somebody’s torch on the far side of a mountain range briefly outline its jagged crest with a sad lightning. I assume it is Arman but at that moment I see another flash from deep in the gulf to my right where somebody else is mining his private seam of fish. Strangely enough this evidence of companions down here fills me with reassurance less than it emphasises distance and isolation. I very often hunt alone at night without a compressor and the initial sense of being companionless in unbounded dark is transformed into absorption. One cannot see anything one’s torch does not illuminate so moves forever as in a room whose fragmentary and misty walls expand before and close in behind. Tonight those far-off lights in the deep, their dim green winkings like algae, arouse in me the melancholy of infinitudes. There is a beautiful story by Ray Bradbury in which he describes the aftermath of an explosion aboard a spaceship. It consists of radio conversations between the survivors who have been flung outwards in all directions, all of them receding from each other, some heading for deep space, one for the Earth to flare briefly in its atmosphere as a meteorite. Their conversations are necessarily short as one by one they go out of radio range on their individual paths to nowhere. Now in the sea off Tiwarik the abysm of salt atmosphere which covers nearly three-quarters of the planet’s face seems to close in on me as the twinkling asteroids of my friends recede. I think I can never catch up with them, not even if I close the distance and work side by side.

We are at about a hundred and twenty feet, to judge from the pressure, the species of fish and occasional plants. Even at midday the light down here is muted to the dimmest blue. The extravagance of foliage swaying in the brightness of the upper water becomes, at this depth, the occasional bank of dark weed whose colour is lost because the lens of water above them filters out practically all red and orange light wavelengths. But the holes in the rocks are full of fish and the increasingly large stretches of sand are not deserts at all. They are alive with shellfish making their purposeful, wavering tracks, with swaying garden eels growing like beds of reeds ready to retract into their holes, with fish drowsing motionlessly just above the seabed while those species which are active at night cruise restlessly above them in the dark. Every so often I turn round completely, flashing the light behind me to surprise anything which has been attracted to the activity and has warily approached. By this method I have already speared (lucky shot) a small barracuda two feet long and viciously toothed and now I turn and am confronted with the large silver platter of a mabilog, a roundish fish of the pampano family which tries too late to shy away from the light. It has already turned when my spear takes it from behind through one open gill and going clean out through its mouth. It is too big to thread alive onto the catch-line, its struggles would be a great hindrance, so I kill it by putting a finger and thumb up under its gill-covers and pinching its heart shut. This is a good quick method but it is unfortunately only practicable for certain species. Some fish are too large to allow one’s fingertips to meet inside while others have razor edges to their gill-covers.

At this point two immense spurs of rock extend like roots from the island, anchoring Tiwarik to the sound. Between these mountain ranges there is a deep ravine floored with sand. I now fly slowly along this valley as through the skies of Drune itself, studying its floor from a few feet up. I must be at a hundred and fifty feet now for the air from the compressor somewhere far overhead no longer gushes into my mouth but leaks sluggishly. If for any reason I had to quicken my respiration rate I should have to drag the air into my lungs. If I were alone on the machine this would not happen before a hundred and eighty feet but the compressor is old and cannot cope with the two of us much deeper than this. So I drift slowly through the night skies of Drune trailing my mouldy bubbles when suddenly I spot a pair of eyes in the sand. There are all sorts of eyes down here – crabs’ eyes, shrimps’ eyes, tiny glitters of sentient ruby – but only rays have them that large and closely set in a lump like a cockpit canopy. Now I can make out the faint edge of its buried body, the long tail with what looks for all the world like an old-fashioned black and white quill fishingfloat. This quill is the animal’s lure, sticking up from the sand, so unignorable that even knowing what it is one is half tempted to pull it up. I am surprised; I had not known pagi lay up for the night as deep as this. It will need a careful shot. I want to kill him outright because he is big, about a metre from wingtip to wingtip, and with that surface area he can displace a powerful amount of water if he struggles. Above all I do not wish to engage with his sting. This is a backward-angled thorn on the dorsal surface of the tail nearer its root than its tip, and for this reason appears poorly sited and unmenacing. This is until one has seen a ray’s rubberlike flexibility with which it can lash its entire body back on itself and sting a creature immediately in front of its head. It would therefore be a bad mistake to hold a stingray’s head thinking that the sting itself was safely down at the other end.

I draw a careful bead between its eyes and fire. The creature explodes in billows of silt which at once obscure it. The nylon line between my fingers snaps tight, goes suddenly limp. I fear the ray has shaken loose the barb and escaped with a headache but the line tautens as I gain a few feet of altitude and there, arising from the spreading cloud below, is the great grey diamond of my prey, showing flashes of white underside as its wingtips curl like the rim of a galvanised bowler hat. Soon the spastic curling changes to regular waves rippling fore-to-aft as if the messages of its dying brain had been reduced to a basic sine-wave pattern. Much relieved I swim off a few metres to a patch of undisturbed sand and settle the ray on the bottom. I lean my weight on the spear and drive its tip right through the fish. This produces no further effect so keeping one hand on the end of the spear I flatten myself to one side, knife in the other hand, and with a strong slash at arm’s length cut through its tail just in front of the sting and slice backwards, carving off the gleaming white thorn which even in this lost wilderness I push point downwards into the sand out of sheer habit.

The only problem with this prize is its weight and resistance in the water but it can’t be helped. It is not worth going up yet. I have lost all sense of time. Now and again I think to see torch-flashes like migraine warnings from somewhere ahead, off to one side, even above me. I picture the four of us each hanging at unequal heights in this dense void at the end of a plastic umbilicus while far overhead the two boats keep pace in silence. By now they will have rounded the island and be heading out towards the mainland. Down here at the bottom the sea’s arcades extend on all sides, infinite in their possibility. A cuttlefish floats in the water beside me in that hunched posture they adopt in readiness for flight; the head up and the body angled slightly down almost as a horse’s head sits on its neck. The large intelligent eyes with their crumpled pupils watch me thoughtfully and it sets up its ‘passing cloud’ defence, hoping to disconcert me with the shimmers of colour crawling over its skin. I nod to it down there, grateful my companions can’t see me failing to shoot a good-sized bagulan. All at once I know too well that sound of the spear going through its crisp bony plate like a nail through styrofoam, the sight of the explosion of ink.

I feel as though I can go on for ever down here letting my light play over this prodigious landscape. I am sure that with a bit of practice I would even be able to survive without breathing like those fabled yogis who bury themselves for months. What a difference between lying in a premature grave staring up at a wooden lid and moving in these blissful ranges. The only thing is I am gradually becoming aware of a change in the sea: it is beginning to smell rather, and it takes me a moment or two to identify the smell as being not unlike hot flux. Maybe somebody is soldering down here. Also, somewhere a long way off, my head has begun to ache. It is no problem, though. It is all a matter (I tell myself) of keeping one’s head. If … Now that takes me back to my second school where Rudyard Kipling’s poem was framed and hung above the dining hall door. If you can keep your head … What makes me think of that down here? The weirdest thing. I find myself reflecting further on the whole ethic of that particular school, with its treatment of literature as either morally uplifting or punishment (Sweet Auburn …) and its dotty militarism. Why, one had only to look at the names of the dormitories. What were they, taken in order from the end of the corridor? Haig, Kitchener, Beatty, rather than Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg … Rosenberg? Isaac Rosenberg? You must be joking. What about that first school in Sussex, though, what were its dormitories called? Wellington, Marlborough … More dead warriors, the whole playing-fields-of-Eton ethos.

Somewhere my body shoots a two-kilo grouper, by itself worth forty pesos in the market at Malubog tomorrow, while my brain struggles to be fair. No, Wellington and Marlborough were followed by Oundle so they must have been referring to public schools. Collectively they represented a much more realistic aspiration for the baby scholars sleeping in them. Who on earth would want to be Haig? ‘If you can keep your head,’ though. What a deeply foolish poem by an often good writer and how typical that our headmaster – like many others of his ilk, no doubt – should have thought it worth hanging up to inspire his little grey-shorted troops. My mind jumps to the South Vietnam-Cambodian border in 1971, to the so-called Parrot’s Beak and the province of Svay Rieng whose territory Congress had repeatedly been assured no American soldier had ever violated. I am reading the flak-jacket of a black US Marine. Carefully written in large magic-marker lettering it says: If you can keep your head when all around are losing theirs they probably know something you don’t, fuckhead. How I wish I had known that in 1953.

Is that a shark or a submarine my light picks up? It is neither. I swim through the space where it wasn’t. The concussions of my heart reach me through the water. As if from afar on a warm summer night the crowd cheers in the Roman Colosseum, a constant roar, a million mandibles applauding. Thumbs down: throw him to the sharks. Good old shark, the raptor of the deep.

Raptor of the deep? My brain is trying to tell my mind something but my body gets in the way, shooting a sea-snake in the head. Always shooting things, my body. Why? It’s silly; you can’t eat sea-snakes, any fool knows that. I make a mental note to punish my body for that later but it seems a bit preoccupied at present with the smell of soldering and an ache in its head. ‘If you can keep your head’, indeed. That’s exactly what not to do. One should make every effort to lose one’s head for good and all and give oneself up to the rapture. Only look at it … I shine my torch around. What I see brings the run of tears to my eyes. They trickle down inside my mask and make the sides of my nose itch as I contemplate the sublime otherness of this place: the solemn architecture of Drune softened by the bunches of coloured weeds disposed with consummate artistry at exactly the right points to gladden the spirits. From a million windows wink a million eyes. Motes and beams dance luminously in the streets, hang their fragile violet banners in the air, float diaphanous buntings which glow in the dark and disappear at the flash of a torch like insubstantial green phlegms. I am in it at last, in it and of it, the underlying real. Another quotation floats out from behind a rock in letters of fire, this one by William Burroughs, a writer whose greatness brings further tears to my eyes. ‘A psychotic is a guy who has just found out what’s going on.’ Right. Right. Exactly. Only the truly mad understand the underlying real. Perfect wisdom for flak-jackets.

Now the entire picture is becoming brighter. The colours are coming out of their shells, stretching and glowing. De Chirico himself sits on a tussock of concrete moss and designs it all. He is a little bald Italian with half-moon spectacles and something inside wonders whether he really looked like that but it hardly matters because there he is, pulling from his mouth a string of words which glow nacreously like the pearls I can see they are: ‘Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were the first to teach the deep significance of the senselessness of life, and to show how this senselessness could be transformed into art.’ There is a pause. Then he brings out a final triumphant sentence which glitters and stings the eye: ‘The dreadful void they discovered is the very soulless and untroubled beauty of matter.’ The truth of this overwhelms me. It cannot be denied. Is not the proof all around me? Soulless and untroubled beauty is here in abundance. Gratefully I offer de Chirico the mouthpiece of my hookah for a puff but it turns out I am myself inside the hookah because the smoke comes out of the end as bubbles, which is wrong. The smoke must be outside. Sadly I replace the tube and de Chirico vanishes.

Far off a light beckons.

I swim towards it and the arcades ascend obligingly, taking me with them. I am sure I am no longer swimming though. It is far more like the progress in a dream, an effortless gliding through the black press of fathoms. I realise why this is. In reality water is not solid at all but layered like flaky pastry. Providing one finds one of the horizontal seams between its strata one can shoot through as if expressed between sheets of oiled rubber. More than ever I am sure I could manage down here without breathing but I am doing so well with my effortless gliding I decide to wait for next time before acquiring another new skill. One thing at a time, this is of the essence. Meanwhile my practised hunter’s body is spearing and spearing, killing and killing until the catch-line is more like a sheet anchor I am towing, a dead weight which retards even my sliding progress.

A light closes on me. I flash my own at it. A terrifying insect face with huge beetle eyes stares back, mouth parts extruding a bubbling proboscis. Its name is Arman and it reaches out a pale claw to touch my shoulder before making a downward jabbing gesture. I grin at it and water rushes into my mouth. I had forgotten there was water out there. I swallow it and follow Arman the beetle. An eternity scuds by in which my body begins to pass back messages. Out of the incoherent weight of there being something I disentangle one or two definites: I am cold, I am immensely tired, my jaw aches, my head aches, the forearm holding the spear gun aches. We are heading down, steadily down and down. As we do so my body is strangely lightening while an oppressive melancholy grows. I am losing something, there is a loss, something recedes. Almost vertically downwards now, deeper and deeper until my head bursts with a roar against the bottom. I wonder what we are doing here but rest for a while in pain. Then a light blazes nearby and, flashing my own in reply, I see Arman the beetle approach with a headache. He reaches out a limb and gently plucks out my own proboscis. This time water does not gush into my mouth but rinses in and out. His voice reaches me. I can hear him perfectly but cannot understand the words.

‘Enough,’ he is saying. ‘Ay, very cold. Also my head aches.’

As if reminded, his headache leaps across and settles on top of the one already in my own skull. His light splits into many parts, his voice into others. In a sickish lurch the universe rights itself and drains away leaving me in my proper mind but with a raging head lolling in the black water next to a boat. The engine’s throb is silent. Intoy is standing up in the prow coiling in Arman’s air-hose, Danding in the stern does the same for mine. A tug at my waist reminds me and I unloop it, weakly, put out a hand and clutch at the bamboo outrigger.

‘My head aches too,’ I say, but with difficulty because my mouth is misshapen, the teeth on one side no longer meeting as they used to and the tongue blundering in so unfamiliar a cavity.

‘Maybe the wind carried some exhaust into the compressor. Monoksyde. Ay, very bad.’ He laughs. ‘I think maybe I get a little crazy down there.’

‘Me too.’ I thought it was nitrogen rather than monoxide which made that happen. ‘Christ, my head.’ I vomit into the sea, voiding what feels like half a gallon of hot saline over my upper arms and chest as I cling to the rocking wood.

‘Do you know what time it is?’ Arman is asking. ‘Four hours we are down there. Very long.’

‘Where are we?’

‘Guess where. No? Sabay.’

‘Sabay?’

‘Right. We’ve crossed right over. Look there.’

A mile away across the strait, so faint and lost in the night as to be all but out of sight, glows the hurricane lamp I left burning back on Tiwarik.

Somehow I heave myself on board. I am still not able to rid myself of a memory which goes on insisting I was heading downwards when I surfaced, that this upper air, this night is in the wrong place, that the entire universe has been stood on its head. Tiwarik. We inspect the haul by the light of our now dim torches. My own catch-line says it all. First the three mangled fish, then a dozen weighing about a pound each, the ray, a splendid grouper. Thereafter my catch becomes more and more bizarre.

‘You’re going to eat this?’ Danding indicates the sea-snake.

‘Well …’ The evidence is that my head had indeed been lost down there. The snake is followed by a small sea-cucumber, a selection of insignificant aquarium fish and finally some carefully threaded bunches of weed. The last item is a lump of abraded red coral which has a hole in it large enough to admit the fluke of my spear. Arman and Danding laugh. They have seen such things before.

‘Don’t worry,’ Arman says. ‘We should have come up earlier. Never mind, you’ve got some huli. That’s a good forty-peso fish you’ve got there.’ He pokes the grouper with a toe. ‘Maybe fifty if there’s not much else in the market.’

Suddenly I realise what I am crouching over. Lying along the bottom of the boat, intermittently visible between thwarts and decking, is a great grey corpse. A shark.

‘Arman?’ I cry. ‘You didn’t …?’

But he had. He explains he noticed this five-footer which was obviously interested in his catch and momentarily being presented with the creature’s soft gill-slits a mere metre away had fired his spear from behind and slightly downwards into the gill, the only possible point of entry into that tough hide. Immediately the shark had rolled in the water instead of darting away and tearing itself free had spun and wrapped the spear around itself like a wire collar. Evidently its own struggles had driven the point into some vital organ for thereafter it had rapidly become feebler enabling Arman to tow it up. He had continued the dive with my spare spear. It was a truly astonishing feat of strength and nerve; the insides of both forearms were raw as if sandpapered by that thrashing hide. I give my own account of the shark which mutilated my catch and show the evidence. It is almost certainly the same animal.

‘We’ll soon know,’ says Danding. ‘When we cut it open we will find the missing halves of your fish.’

The other boat with our three companions is long gone. Danding ferries me back to Tiwarik on my insistence: I need to be by myself. On the way Intoy praises me extravagantly for my ray, putting his finger into its mean little slit of a mouth. I think he feels I need consoling in the face of Arman’s amazing triumph and for that I am grateful. I bequeath him and Danding my entire catch except for a couple of fish for my own breakfast. I am full of residues: of disorientation, of headache, of being so outrageously bested by Arman. Of course it was competitive, how could it not have been? Left alone I stare sleeplessly up at the thatch and reflect on the underwater journey we have made, on the barricades of reason I crossed. I have no real idea where I am. Endless black water is still flowing around and through me.

In the morning my headache has more or less gone but I am sluggish and subdued as if not merely my body had been flattened beneath the incalculable tonnage separating the place where I sit from the distant village of Sabay. For an entire morning the world seems oddly two-dimensional while somewhere inside there persists that conviction of the world’s being inverted. I am sure I was heading downwards when I came up. It takes many hours for this certainty to fade during which time the landscape fattens out again and things gradually take on depth. I am reoriented.

In the afternoon I walk to the top of the bluff overlooking the beach and sit in the sun like an invalid or the survivor of a bad accident made thoughtful. The island feels warm and reassuring beneath my back but then it turns scornful of my stupidity. Your element is the air, it says, blowing its grasses across my face. Your element is the sun which falls in brilliant crimson on your closed eyelids. You may carry them safely with you beneath the sea as long as you don’t surrender them to the compressor. You relied so much on mechanical assistance you lost touch with your proper element and equally lost touch with the sea. Instead of heightened awareness you experienced mere hallucination. You may extend the limits of your landscape to take you beneath the sea but only if you go down unassisted. Lungfuls of air, a hut on an island. That is all. That is enough.

Why bother? I ask the island in return. Why the undergoing of extremes to see a few things a little differently? What need of such harshness?

No answer. The grasses continue to brush my face, the sun to fall on my shut eyes. Far off below the sea crumbles and crumbles away at the shingle.